Rêve Coffee in Lafayette, LA. ☕️

New feature for Micro.blog’s Bluesky cross-posting: preview cards. This is still off by default, but if you flip it on in Sources, Micro.blog will try to figure out the title, description, and og:image for the first link in your post and attach it. Screenshot:

Federico Viticci wonders if Apple should have their own API that could bridge to OpenAI and Anthropic, offering Apple’s own seal of approval on privacy and security. It would be a nice surprise if Apple did something like this. They could wrap together on-device models and private cloud compute too.

MarsEdit 5.3.3 is out! This release adds support for Micro.blog blog post summaries with a new “excerpt” field in MarsEdit.

Excellent Dithering today — and Upgrade yesterday for the 2-hour version 🙂 — about how the Apple Intelligence rollout missed the mark. Time for Apple to take off the rails and open up APIs and models so developers can take the lead for a while, like how Mac apps innovated with desktop publishing.

Gus Mueller thinks Apple needs to get out of the way with AI:

The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s.

Good post. I included several quotes in my post this morning and would’ve added Gus’s post too. Experimenting with LLMs running locally is perfect for developers who build Mac apps. Maybe third-party developers need a convention to download and share models between apps?

After lunch I ended up having to head out of town unexpectedly to visit family, so gonna miss the afternoon SXSW and Fediverse House events. It was amazing catching up with folks who I only knew online, and meeting some people for the first time. Have a great week and safe travels!

POSSE.

Now that bookmark tags are available to all plans on Micro.blog, it’s more consistent to manage bookmarks. I’ve moved my read-later type activities to Micro.blog. Just nice to have it all in one place to bookmark posts and blog about them. Screenshot example of a bookmark with summary and tags:

Ever since Apple revealed their AI strategy to lean into on-device models, there has been a sort of tension with the approach from other companies like OpenAI, Google, and Amazon. Was Apple Intelligence going to work? There are advantages: for user privacy because more data ...

Good morning, Austin. Back downtown after a great day yesterday at Fediverse House.

“This isn’t a time for competition. It is a time for cooperation.” — Evan Prodromou in a panel on different platforms at Fediverse House

Just a few minutes in to arriving at Fediverse House and already it was super valuable. There is really nothing like meeting people face to face. It’s an exciting time for the open web and you can feel it in hearing what people are working on and thinking about.

Bastrop Abstract Company. Established 1883. Closed.

Micro Social continues to improve. The new version adds a share sheet and iPad support.

We just passed an old wagon and mules on highway 290. It was Cowboy’s Last Ride, a restored wagon from 1899, going 350 miles across central Texas to raise money for St. Jude:

At 82 years old, Larry Jollisant, has chosen to honor his life as a cowboy in the most authentic, western way possible. […] Every night, he sets up camp, cooks over an open flame, and sleeps under the stars or in the wagon, embracing the same hardships and beauty that defined the cowboy way of life.

I love this. 🤠

Interesting segment on The Late Show last night with guest Reid Hoffman about AI. I’ve listened to his Masters of Scale podcast from time to time. On AI, I’ve realized recently that we are not all ever going to agree about the benefits and dangers. It’s a big shift and there will be a big schism.

Ready to plant, along Mopac. 🌱

Linkrot is always a problem for the web, but please let’s not purposefully destroy our own content when it’s easy to keep it going. John Gruber on 538 shutting everything down:

Why not keep the FiveThirtyEight site up and running — at least for a while, if not in perpetuity? It costs practically nothing to run a website serving a static/archived website. I don’t get it. It betrays a profound level of disrespect for the work that the site hosted.

Seth Godin blogs about making the most of a second chance with customers:

If a customer service call goes wrong, or if a new employee is stumbling, this is the moment to escalate and get the second impression just right. It shows that we can recover, that we’re listening, and that the relationship is worth something to us.

Listening to the Decoder episode with Panos Panay, I’m almost convinced that what Amazon is trying with Alexa+ will work. Everyone’s expectations are so low with voice assistants. If they actually pull it off, it will be impressive.

Parker Ortolani blogging about the new MacBook Air. I hadn’t even thought about the color until now:

For the first time in 24 years, since the introduction of the first white iBook, Apple has a blue laptop again. While the new MacBook Airs are most certainly a “spec bump,” they make for a pretty good one.

Interesting new post from OpenAI about safety. About humans being in control:

Our approach to alignment centers humans. We aim to develop mechanisms that empower human stakeholders to express their intent clearly and supervise⁠ AI systems effectively - even in complex situations, and as AI capabilities scale beyond human capabilities.

This is probably my biggest concern, AI agents running without human supervision and executing tasks that are beyond what we even know how to do. There are many positive benefits to AI, but there are also some things we shouldn’t attempt.

Tapbots is working on a Bluesky client, called Phoenix. On making it a separate app, they say:

While there may be some conveniences of an app that supports multiple social media protocols, we believe the experience will be much better overall if we keep them separate. We do plan to provide a way to cross-post between them so you don’t have to write duplicate posts.

This is fine, but I think eventually more people will just post to their own blogs and not have to manage separate apps or accounts.

Very quick video of the latest Micro.blog for Mac with new blog post summary field. You can type your own summary that will be used in the timeline and cross-posting, or have it generate one for you.

Reminder for folks in Austin, Fediverse House is this weekend, Sunday and Monday. I’ll be there. In a happy coincidence, Sunday is also the anniversary of the first post to my blog. 23 years.

Worked a bunch on the Mac app today, one of my favorite things to work on. Almost done with the next update, so I’ll wrap it up tomorrow morning and release it. Also finally solved that ridiculous “41 new posts” bug.

I like this post from @devilgate about not being discouraged to write, even when we know that doing more than writing could have a better impact:

But not everyone can do more, or give more. And even those who can, or could or should: for some of us, writing is not just what we do, it’s what we are. We need to write.

With politics there’s also an opposite problem, avoiding blogging about something just because it’s a controversial topic. The web is a big place with room to explore a lot of ideas, we probably shouldn’t second-guess ourselves as much as we sometimes do.

Funny that SF Symbols now has a “robotic vacuum” icon but not just a robot. Wonder if it’s an oversight or because of Android. 🤖

Sometimes the debugging is all in the wrong place. Spent a couple hours trying to find a bug in JavaScript — lots of printf-style debugging, element inspection, random code changes — only to eventually track it down to a single line of CSS.